The Internet provides for the collective resources available within large networks to be shared among users. The growth of the Internet has allowed sharing of computer resources to be brought to wide audiences. For many companies, Internet sites are an integral part of the business, offering customers detailed information on available products, providing customers with a direct means of making purchases, and serving as a conduit between technical support operations and customers in need of service.
The World Wide Web (“the WEB”) is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. Client machines engage in transactions with WEB servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known protocol providing users with access to files (e.g., text, graphics, sound, or video) using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides for document formatting and allows the developer to specify links to other files, often located on other servers. Network paths to servers are identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection.
Information is generally retrieved using an HTML compatible browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer™, on a client machine. WEB browsers have become the primary interface for access to most Internet services. When the user of the browser enters a URL, the client PC issues a request to a naming service to map the hostname specified in the URL to a network IP address where the server is located. Using the IP address, the browser establishes a connection to the server and retrieves the requested file, which is usually an HTML encoded WEB page.
Entering a URL into the address field of a WEB browser can be a difficult task for many users, particularly when they are unfamiliar with the WEB site they are visiting. While the URL for a WEB page can be brief (e.g., www.ibm.com), sub-pages can have lengthy URLs in what may appear to be an arcane syntax. Some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer™, Netscape Navigator™, and Mozilla™ have added features, such as history and auto-complete features that remember URLs previously visited by the user. The history and auto-complete features provide the completed URL to the user as a selection when the user either begins to enter a URL in the address field that begins with the same characters or chooses to browse a history window. However, these conventional WEB browser features require that the user has previously visited the URL the user is seeking, offering little help if the user has never visited the WEB page before. Additionally, these conventional WEB browser features fail to provide URLs to the user in an easy to navigate hierarchy.
In view of the problems associated with conventional WEB browsers, it would be desirable to have a WEB browser that already knows the URLs of pages a user might wish to visit and provides these URLs to the user in a way that is easy to understand, easy to navigate, and easy for the user to select the URL being sought.